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Forgetting, Part 2

October 12, 2013

What does he do, my father, with himself, by himself, in his room alone at the rest home, from which room he might never leave if not for the caregivers coming to take him for his meals? His body is weak from diabetes and congestive heart failure, so he can’t walk any reasonable distance or do much of anything phsyical; with his memory at equal strength, reading even a stub of a newspaper article is too much. He has a TV and DVD player; he doesn’t watch TV. He has CDs and a boom box; he doesn’t listen to music. Once upon a time he painted; he hasn’t lifted a paintbrush in years. With the other residents, he sometimes holds conversations, but only of the how-are-you-or-the-weather kind — with his tenuous memory, it’s impossible for him to maintain continuity.

And before — what did he do? Work and tennis, maybe listening to a little bit of classical, maybe watching tennis on the TV, and before I was a teenager sometimes puttering in the garden. Cleaning and maintaining the properties he owned, along with the paperwork and administration that went with same. But then what? My father never was much of a reader. He would pick up the news, maybe a magazine, almost never a book. Never learned computers. Never much of a traveler. My father never made a social butterfly. Even the conversations he had back then were frequently of the how-are-you-or-the-weather kind. Tell him anything and a week later he wouldn’t remember much, if anything at all. Years ago (decades ago!) when I stopped telling him things, it wasn’t just the teenage disease — often I never bothered because I didn’t believe he would remember.

Cooped up in his failing brain, I’m certain my father doesn’t ponder great meanings-of-it-all or the sweep of world events (he never came close to that when he was younger). But does he even wonder what day it is? What’s for dinner? What’s the year, what’s the season? It’s strange, but he generally seems content with the thinness of it all. And since in anyone’s brain memories of days long past remain sturdier than recent memories, undoubtedly he must realize (at least a little) that his thinking has changed. That this gauze was not always his mind. But, but, but — he remains unflustered. Against his crippled neurons, he never rails. If anything, in entering dementia my father seems to have found his groove.

Let me say: it is not in the nature of America to be haunted. Compared to the world at large, by and large, Americans don’t seem to have the same memory. Not the clinical memory of academic history (probably a separate failing) but the soulful story of people, land, and life. Of rights and wrongs, of debts and gifts, of joys and griefs.

But why should we? After all, this is a country of (primarily) immigrants and refugees, outcasts and expatriates, who often came to this nation to avoid the one where they were born. Not exclusively, no doubt, but for many, this escape was apparently agreeable. America was the land that freed them their natal memory (to the degree such memories can be freed).

(Yes, I am setting aside all tribes of Native Americans in what has now become known as America, who — while unquestionably American in a sense — are also in many ways nations of their own tribes.)

And let’s not forget, too, the nature of America’s own birth as a nation, a smattering of colonies escaping an empire (or, perhaps more accurately, a smattering of colonies eager to strike out on their own). And that fresh beginning would be impossible without some rejection of our roots — in other words, forgetting. So that forgetting is in our birth, along with all adjoining senses of rebirth and renewal, of college tries and second chances.

Our national inception also took place just prior to that widespread assumption of nationalism, the notion that (of course!) a people, culture, and language geographically belong together. So in many ways our national forgetting was never replaced by national rememberance. Rather we set stock in what is near to us in space — state, city, borough — and near to us in time — our recent past, our immediate future.

I have been told by an immigrant friend of mine that a feeling unique to America is that the individual is supposed to belong. Is this then our nationalism — the patriotism of me?

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